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Overview
Wellington is a giant because he was one of the greatest military commanders in British history, an important figure in the emergence of Britain as a great imperial power, a man who dominated British society and politics for 35 years. He was the only one of Napoleon's contemporaries who can be mentioned in the same breath as a general - a master of logistics, politics and coalition warfare as well as strategy, operations and tactics. The book's focus is on Wellington's military career, and it looks at all of these aspects, placing them in the context of the military and political developments of the time. It explores Wellington's personality – a key to understanding his success - and briefly examines his post-Waterloo career as a politician. It concludes that Wellington was not only a military genius, but an icon whose fame endures to our own time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750963381 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2017 |
| Series: | Pocket GIANTS |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 986 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Fighting General
The 1st Duke of Wellington is one of the big beasts of British history. He was the most successful British general of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and one of the finest British generals of all time, arguably the finest; and can be compared favourably with the greatest commanders from other countries and ages. His victories in the Peninsular War (1808–14) and Waterloo (1815) gave Britain immense international prestige, and helped lay the foundation for the century of British greatness that was to follow. From Waterloo until his death in 1852 Wellington was a dominating presence in British life. He was an important player on the political scene, having spells as Prime Minister during some of the most turbulent times in nineteenth-century British history. In his lifetime Wellington was a national hero, although not an uncontested one. Posthumously the controversies faded, and it was Wellington the soldier, not Wellington the controversial politician, that was remembered.
This book appears in a series on historical 'giants'. Wellington's claim to be a giant rests squarely on his career as a fighting general, which climaxed in 1815. His post-Waterloo career as a politician is not the pedestal upon which his greatness stands. So in keeping with the theme of the series, the focus is on Wellington the military commander, with his life after Waterloo being dealt with only briefly.
We are living though a golden age of scholarship on Wellington. Rory Muir's two-volume life, backed by an informative website, is an immensely impressive piece of scholarship. Huw Davies' military biography is likewise a substantial contribution to our understanding of Wellington. In addition to these books, a number of other important works have appeared in the last twenty years or so, by Bruce Collins, Charles Esdaile, Ian Fletcher, Alan Forrest, David Gates, Paddy Griffith, Christopher D. Hall, Philip Haythornthwaite, Richard Holmes, Donald Horward, Roger Knight, Joshua Moon and John Severn, among others. This has added to older but still useful books in the Wellingtonian canon by the likes of Anthony Brett-James, David Chandler, Godfrey Davies, John Fortescue, Michael Glover, Philip Guedalla, Elizabeth Longford, Charles Oman, S.P.G. Ward and Jac Weller. Why then do we need another book on Wellington? My first answer is that a very short book based on a synthesis of up-to-date scholarship and original sources fills a niche in the market. My second answer is that I wanted to write it.
I have been fascinated by Wellington since my early teens, when I read Elizabeth Longford's classic biography. Although my academic career has taken the path of a military historian of the twentieth century, my interest in the Napoleonic period has never left me. I have been fortunate enough to lead study tours to Waterloo, and to Wellington's battlefields in Spain and Portugal (not, alas, India – or not yet anyway). The opportunity of writing a short biography proved too tempting to resist.
When I began to research this book, I wondered whether Wellington would, after all, turn out to be a giant. The reputations of historical figures are always ripe for revision, especially one who has been the subject of some fairly uncritical hagiography. And yet having written the book, having taken into account his mistakes, the large slices of luck that he enjoyed at critical points of his career, and the less-than-attractive facets of his personality, I have come to the conclusion that Wellington's reputation as a military commander is deserved. Wellington's contemporary, the great Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, wrote of individuals with 'appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament ... in a harmonious combination,' in possession of 'very highly developed mental aptitude for a particular occupation'. Such people had 'genius'. One such, as this book argues, was the Duke of Wellington.
CHAPTER 2
Irish Beginnings
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington was born in Ireland. He was thus one of a long line of Irish soldiers, or at least soldiers with strong Irish connections, that have contributed much to the British army down the years. And yet the British army has always had an ambivalent relationship with Ireland. More than once British troops have been deployed on Irish soil to confront insurgency and outright rebellion, and Irishmen serving in the army were subject to suspicion about their loyalty to the Crown. This was particularly the case in Wellington's lifetime. He was the product of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy: a caste of Protestant landowners, translated from the England and Scotland of centuries before, which held sway over a largely Roman Catholic and extremely poor population. Wellington always had something of the loner and outsider about him, and more than one biographer has seen his Ascendency background, as a member of a beleaguered, privileged minority in an alien land, as a key to his character. Tensions and repression in the Ireland of Wellington's youth certainly existed, but the idea that Arthur Wellesley was shaped by the insecurity of a settler class that constantly feared disaster at the hands of the colonised should not be overstressed. Ireland was simultaneously 'too physically close and too similar to Great Britain to be treated as a colony, but too separate and too different to be a region of the metropolitan centre'. His upbringing in such an ambiguous land, when added to his innate personality traits, helps to explain the development of Wellington's personality.
The Wellesley family were a powerful part of the United Kingdom aristocracy that emerged after the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, but being Irish, rather than English or Scots, the family were something of outsiders. Wellington's elder brother Richard was created a marquess in the Irish rather than the socially superior British peerage in 1799. Richard was furious at this 'double gilt Potato', informing the Prime Minster of his 'bitter disappointment ... at the ostensible mark of favour' bestowed by the King. More positively, Wellington's experience in Ireland helped give him a rather more tolerant view of Roman Catholics than many of his English peers. In 1793 Arthur spoke in the Irish House of Commons in favour of a liberal policy towards Catholicism – this a major exception to his instinctive conservatism. The result of these influences was a withdrawn man who, in making his way in the army, a UK-wide institution that played a major role in forging the British identity, not least in the wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, revealingly wrote that 'I like to walk alone'.
Arthur Wesley (as the surname was spelled at the time) was probably born on 1 May 1769, in Dublin, although both date and place are uncertain. His mother, Anne, was the wife of Garret Wesley, Earl of Mornington and Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin. Conceivably, Wellington's ancestors had arrived in Ireland some 600 years before his birth. His childhood was spent at the family seat of Dangan and in Dublin, before the family decamped to London. Some individuals show signs of great promise at a very young age. Arthur Wesley was not among their number. He was sent to Eton in 1781. There is no contemporary evidence that Wellington ever said that 'The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton'. Far from being an enthusiast for team games, Arthur was a lonely, rather solitary boy. His father died in 1781, with the result that money became even tighter in a family that was by the standards of their peers already impecunious. Arthur was withdrawn from Eton in 1784 and went to live with his mother in Brussels (then a much cheaper place to live than London). Unlike Arthur, his brother Richard, the bright and ambitious new Earl of Mornington, was clearly going places.
Arthur was sent to France in 1786, to finish what passed for his education at the Royal Equitation Academy at Angers. In despair, his mother had declared him fit only as 'food for [gun] powder, and nothing more', and Richard had begun to pull strings to get his brother a career in the army. Although at Angers Arthur suffered from ill health, spending some enjoyable but scarcely profitable time on a sofa, playing with his pet terrier, this period marked a modest stepping-stone on the path to maturity. On catching sight of her son, Lady Mornington was struck by how he had physically grown up. The change was not just physical. The director of the Academy singled out 'one Irish lad of great promise, of the name of Wesley' one of the first times anyone caught a glimpse of the man Arthur was to come. Alongside the practical skills he learned – familiarity with the French language, horse- and swordsmanship – Wesley grew in social confidence, and cemented his firm attachment to the world of the ancien régime. Within a few short years, this world was to collapse. That reactionary conservatism was to become one of the mainsprings of Wellington's character can surely be in large part traced back to Angers. While he was there, the French monarchy was approaching the crisis that was eventually to plunge the whole of Europe into turmoil. The storming of the Bastille occurred only two and a half years after Wesley left the Academy. Wesley's fate was to be closely bound up with fighting successive French regimes that destroyed the elegant world that he so admired.
Richard was seemingly less impressed by his younger brother's transformation. Writing to the Lord Lieutenant, he described Arthur as 'perfectly idle', but this letter was to end this idleness, for it was an appeal for a commission in the army for his sibling. Arthur seems to have had no burning desire for a military career, and he was far from the only well-connected youth in the officer corps with this attitude. The army was in the doldrums in the 1780s. It was in the shadow of the American War of Independence, which had ended in 1783 with defeat, despite a generally creditable record. Swingeing cuts had reduced the army's numbers. While there were opportunities for active service overseas, in the reaches of the empire, for units stationed in Britain and Ireland the standard fare was internal security – all the more important in the absence of a police force. The army recruited from opposite ends of society, the officers being drawn from the social elite, and the rank and file from the poor. The gulf between the ranks was enormous, although shared experience on campaign and loyalty to regiment could build bridges.
On joining the army Arthur Wesley played the system for all it was worth – or perhaps he had the system played for him. Becoming an ensign in the 73rd Highlanders in 1787, he took advantage of his ability to 'purchase' commissions to move from regiment to regiment, gaining steps in rank as he did so. Purchase allowed rich but mediocre or even incompetent men to progress rapidly, with this huge disadvantage being occasionally balanced by the fact it allowed able officers with funds to get on in an army otherwise dominated by seniority. By April 1793, Wesley had held commissions in no less than seven regiments, but seems to have served with none of them except in the most perfunctory fashion. Wesley's time was spent in and around Dublin, where he served as an aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant, and he became active in politics. In April 1790 he was elected to the Irish Parliament for the Wesley family seat of Trim. From this point onwards Wesley's career was to consist of politics intertwined with military affairs.
Gradually, however, Wesley began to take his military career more seriously. In 1793, he asked Lord Longford for permission to marry Longford's sister Catherine ('Kitty'). Arthur suffered the humiliation of being refused. In truth, he wasn't much of a catch. Stung, Wesley turned to his career, burning (or possibly giving away) his violin, dramatically making a break with his old self. Similarly, he paid less attention to the heavy gambling that was part of the life of the fashionable young man in Dublin, and concentrated on the minutiae of life as a regimental officer. Such a focused, painstaking, almost micromanaging approach was to characterise Wesley's subsequent career.
The events in France that eventfully led to the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy had been initially greeted with enthusiasm across the Channel. As the situation became radicalised, conservative-minded people in Britain turned against the unfolding revolution. One man who became appalled by the events in France was Arthur Wesley. He spoke in the Irish House of Commons in January 1793, attacking the incarceration of King Louis XVI and the incursion of French troops into the Low Countries – the factor that eventually brought about war between Britain and France.
Wesley sought active service overseas, evidence of his newly discovered commitment to soldiering; this would also have had the advantage of removing him from the scene of his recent misfortunes. He accompanied his regiment, the 33rd Foot, when in June 1794 it was sent as part of a small British expedition to the Low Countries. Thanks to loans from Richard, Arthur had been able to buy a major's commission in the 33rd in April 1793, before purchasing a lieutenant colonelcy in the following September. So, thanks to the power of money, the 24-year-old Wesley, hitherto more of a courtier and politician than a real soldier, was first to see battle as the commander of an infantry battalion, with the lives of hundreds of men as his responsibility. Lieutenant Colonel Wesley had had no formal training for the role, and his first campaign was to be a brutal introduction to the realities of warfare.
CHAPTER 3
Fladers and India, 1793-1804
When war broke out between Britain and Revolutionary France in 1793 a British force commanded by King George III's son, the Duke of York, was deployed to Flanders, to cooperate with a smaller Dutch force and a much larger Austrian army. But the operations in this north-western corner of Europe were just one part of a much bigger picture. Not for the first time, or, as Wellington was to later experience, the last, coalition partners had very different strategic objectives. Following setbacks on the battlefield, in the summer of 1794 Austria decided to cut its losses in Flanders and concentrate on Germany and eastern Europe, abandoning its British ally. Fearing that ports of Nieuport and Ostend would fall into French hands, in June 1794 the British hastily deployed a force under Lord Moira to Flanders. Wesley's 33rd Foot sailed from Cork as part of this expedition.
This was a case of too little, too late. Moira was forced to retreat from Ostend, using the 33rd Foot as part of the rearguard brigade. (Some historians mistakenly place Wesley in command of the brigade). On 15 September 1794 Wesley had his first taste of combat, in a minor action at Boxtel. His battalion was covering the retirement of other units after a failed attack, when the 1st Guards was disordered by a retreating British cavalry unit. But as a Guards officer recorded, the 33rd was 'formed in the rear, and opening to allow them to pass, wheeled up, and initially throwing a few cool and well-directed volleys into the enemy's squadrons obliged him to decamp precipitately' and the force was able to fall back unhindered. While too much should not be made of a very minor clash conducted by an obscure officer, Colonel Wesley's calm leadership was certainly noticed by his superiors.
The retreating British eventually took up an apparently strong position on the River Waal, and the French closed up to the far side of the river. It was an active sector. Writing just before Christmas 1794 Wesley recorded that for six weeks the 33rd was near Nijmegan, holding the outposts:
At present the French keep us in a perpetual state of alarm, we turn out once, sometimes twice, every night; the officers and men are harassed to death ... I have not had my clothes off my back for a long time, and generally spend the greatest part of the night upon the banks of the river. In early January 1795 the British retreated to the Rhine, and then, as the French continued their offensive, to the Ems. Wesley continued to command the 33rd – again, the claims of some historians that he commanded a brigade during the retreat are wishful thinking – until he went home on leave in early March. Famously, he was to say of his first campaign that, 'I learnt what one ought not to do, and that is always something'.
Active service failed to set Arthur Wesley wholeheartedly onto the path of dedication to a military career. On his return from Germany he picked up his dormant political career, but failing to gain preferment, by the autumn of 1795 Wesley had resumed his military duties with the 33rd Foot. British strategy was increasingly focused on seizing enemy colonies, especially valuable sugar islands in the West Indies. The 33rd was sent to this theatre in November 1795, only for the convoy to be scattered by gales. The 33rd's ship limped back to England. The Duke of Wellington was given to talking about the 'finger of providence'; here is an early example of him having the course of his life changed by a factor quite beyond his control. Among British troops in the Caribbean in the 1790s, the mortality rate from sickness was appallingly high. Had the 33rd reached the West Indies, Arthur Wesley could all too easily have been among their number. Instead, the regiment was dispatched to India.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wellington Pocket Giants"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Gary Sheffield.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
1 A Fighting General,
2 Irish Beginnings,
3 Flanders and India, 1793–1804,
4 General in Waiting, 1805–1808,
5 From Oporto to Talavera, 1809,
6 'The cautious system', 1810,
7 The Commander and His Army,
8 On the Offensive, 1811–1812,
9 Peninsular Endgame, 1813–1814,
10 Waterloo, 1815,
11 After Waterloo,
12 Legacy and Assessment,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
Timeline,
Further Reading,